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Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. EMAIL - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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July 22, 2001 - Updates at 0845 and 2030
Good morning. It's a happy Monday morning from me to you, and Tee Minus Nine Days from the movers to me. Yeah, I've got a lot left to do, but we're much relaxed from our little trip to Ashland. Herewith, a vacation report, interspersed with pictures of the Green Show. Let me explain that first.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a repertory theatre company that runs about 11 or so plays each year, in continuous rotation over an eight month season. During the balmy months, this includes three plays in the outdoor Elizabethan Theatre. Shows go on there each night, and before the show, outside the theatre, there's the Green Show. It's a music and dance production designed for each play that it precedes, so there are three distinct Green Shows. It's presented by Dance Kaleidoscope, Terra Nova Consort, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival musicians (Individuals are listed at this link).
Monday last, we drove up. That was enough for one day, we didn't try to schedule an evening performance for our driving day. That and Mondays, the Festival rests anyway. We gave Sally a dose of boromine (an over the counter motion sickness remedy recommended by the vet), and she did very well. We did the drive in about 7 hours, discounting stops for food and such. Our week's stay was at the Bard's Inn, a Best Western motel. We've stayed there before, pleased with the service and their willingness to let Sally vacation with us. Because we didn't want their staff to have to mind the dog, we mostly did the room up ourselves. We'd leave the privacy tag up and the trash out, they emptied and left us fresh linens. It all worked out very nicely.
Tuesday begins the fun (and pictures here are from the Green Show Gershwin in Love). At 10 in the morning, we started a Backstage Tour. The event is introduced in one of the performance spaces (this year, in the New Theatre), then we're split into groups of 25 or so, and given a guide. Ours was Danforth Comins, an actor with the company. First we talked about New Theatre. It's a (as it's name might imply) brand new space, just opened in March. It replaces the old Black Swan, which was both too small and not really designed as a performance area (the Swan was a converted car dealership garage). New Theater seats up to about 350 people, in its maximum configuration (seats are removable, depending on staging requirements, per show).
We went backstage through the Bowmer theatre, a medium sized space seating a little over 600 at maximum. Five different plays are put on through this season in this one theatre. The building is named after Angus Bowmer, founder of the Shakespeare Festival. The Bowmer is linked underground with the Elizabethan Theatre; the two spaces share their green room, dressing rooms and also contain many of the small services areas, wigs for instance. (At right you can see just how crowded the Green Show gets, there's a couple hundred people on the lawn, and 4 deep SRO at the back, all the way around.)
Walking through the underground, we came up backstage in the Elizabethan. Designed and build in the 1930s, the theatre is designed in a manner similar to the open air theatres (like the Globe) in which Shakespeare's plays were originally performed. We stood and talked about how the production goes on from just behind the Left Below entrance to the stage proper. Cue lights, a production board, and quick changes (costumes, of course) all came up. Finally we all headed out across the stage, down the stairs and out into the seats for a final Q & A session with Danforth before ending the tour. You can see a snapshot of that here (posted yesterday) - it's the only stop on the Backstage Tour where pictures are allowed.
Tuesday afternoon, we saw our first play of this vacation, Julius Caesar. A strong production, and when all was said and done, our favorite play out of the five productions we saw this trip. Derrick Lee Weeden was great as Brutus, and Mark Murphey as the lean Caius Cassius was perfect as well. Following the play, a brief walk back to the room, take Sally for a little pee break, and we headed back to the Festival for that night's Green Show, entitled Gershwin In Love. That's shown in the pictures above. Thus ended our first day at the Festival.
I have chores to do, and more packing. When I need a break, I'll come back and continue this writeup. See you later!
2030 - I'm just back to let you know that I'm bushed. I spent the morning on the phone changing addresses for periodicals, working with insurance agents for both auto and renters coverage, and some banking business. At about 11:30 I started dismantling the living room. I've got almost everything there packed too, now, but I am beat. I'll put up more pictures and trip report from last week's Ashland run tomorrow morning. G'night!
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July 23, 2002 - Updates at 0830
Good morning. What with all the travelling and moving and what not, Linux is holding up well for me. I'm not doing anything exciting or bleeding edge (well, not much). I'm simply doing what needs to get done, both for entertainment and work, without any problems at all. Often times, what I write about is how I broke something, and fixed it again. Now that's perhaps interesting to write about and to do. But for those of you that simply want a computer that does what you need it to do, and stays out of your way the rest of the time, I can tell you that Linux can handle that, too.
Here are the programs I'm using:
Now let's finish off the trip report from our trip to Ashland last week. The photos accompanying this section are from the Wednesday evening Green Show, entitled Seasons. Wednesday we started off in a leisurely fashion, up by about 0730, showered and out shortly thereafter. Breakfast at the Bard's Inn is cold, but more varied than your standard stale croissant and weak lukewarm coffee that many places call a continental breakfast. There are an assortment of muffins, breads and rolls, cereals, milk, juice, coffe and tea. Not so bad, really. After breakfast, we turned the sign on our room door so that housekeeping would come in and clean, then we took Sally for a walk. We went through town, bypassing Lithia Park. Why? Well, dogs aren't allowed in that jewel of a green patch. Apparently dogs have been known to harrass the ducks at the pond. So we went on, to a spot called Triangle Park. Not much of a park, really. It's next to the main road, unfenced and small. But the park is green, and nicely shaded, a good place for a tired old dog and Marcia's still-healing knee to rest while I walked back. Fetching the car, I picked up the two of them, and we dropped into Safeway for some sandwich fixings.
After lunch, we prepared ourselves then headed over to our first play of the day, Noises Off, in the Bowmer. Noises Off is a farce written by Michael Frayn, and extraordinarily funny. Directed by Kenneth Albers, the play sparkles in it's missed cues, wrong lines, pratfalls, and at times, sheer malice. There's a movie of the same name, with Carol Burnett, Christopher Reeves and others, which I thought was a real hoot. But this live production had the movie beat hollow! Once that show was over, we gathered ourselves back into some semblance of dignity, wiping the tears of laughter from our eyes, and headed back to the room for a quick bite before coming back to see the Green Show.
As I may have mentioned, there are three Green Shows, one each preceeding each of the three plays showing in the Elizabethan Theatre. This night's, before The Winter's Tale, was called Seasons. Sometimes there are direct allusions to the action of the play, other times the dancing is merely wonderful. Seasons directly reflects some of the elements in the play that followed, and as usual is a real crowd pleaser.
Our second play of the day (totalling up to three performances, a busy day indeed) was The Winter's Tale. While the play is generally acknowleged as one of Shakespeare's comedies, it's one with a black heart and a tragic soul. But there are points to consider: the show ends on a happy note with a royal wedding and the supposedly dead restored to life. There are some bits of humor sprinkled in amongst the woe and paranoia of the first act. And the staging of the second act was nothing but fun - themed after the Summer of Love. As I told Marcia, as it's not a history, and it ends well, it has to be a comedy, however bleak it seems at times during the play! One item of note: Five of the actors from the afternoon's production of Noises Off were in this play as well. Now that's a hard day's work, right? The show was done a bit after 11:30, so we trudged off to bed.
Thursday dawned bright and pretty. The smoke from assorted lightning-started fires around Northern California and South Oregon was finally dissipating, and we could really tell the difference. And now we're on the downside of our vacation: three days gone by, three yet to pass, but only two plays and one Green Show left to occupy our time. We entertained ourselves with another, shorter dog walk, and some serious reading time, before heading out to the one play of the day: Macbeth.
My goodness, what a strong, grim production. This was our one play in the New Theatre. The cast was small, reflecting the size of the space. Only three main characters: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and Banquo. All others, from Duncan to Witches to MacDuff and his family and assorted soldiers, all were played by just three other cast members, including Suzanne Irving (notable because I went to high school with her, and we were both involved in theatre there, she went on to great things in that field, I merely enjoy the fruits of her work). Macbeth was well-played by G. Valmont Thomas, and Lady Macbeth by BW Gonzales.
The theatre configuration was full round, with a raised circular platform in the middle, and set within that, a glowing cauldron of blood. That was about it. A couple of chairs, once or twice, a sword and a pair of daggers completed the props for the play. All the rest was acted. Battles were done with the blood from the cauldron, which was liberally spread among all of the players, as they die one by one. I still wonder how much rehearsal they went through to make sure they didn't spatter the audience with the same blood! Grim, grim, grim. But a solid production, highly recommended.
In the evening, we caught the Green Show yet again. This one was called Sound and Fury. It precedes the evening's show: Titus and Andronicus, which we did not see, having had enough of tragedy for one run of plays already. Of the three Green Shows, I thing this one was best. The largest dance troupe of the three, percussion and keyboards for music, and powerful choreography made this one really stand out!
Friday was utterly lazy. We went downtown for a while. Marcia found a quilting store and a pattern or two there. Then we went to the second hand bookstore where Marcia found some sewing books and I some SciFi to round out my collection. We read and ate and napped through the balance of the day, skipping the Green Show since we saw Gershwin in Love our first night.
At about 7:30 we headed over to the Elizabethan, and saw our last play of the trip, As You Like It. A fun, fun play, truly a comedy (as opposed to the grudgingly happy ending of Winter's Tale) Lot's of fun with language and pantomime and props. A bit of singing and a lot of strong acting. A great show! I give special notice to Dan Donohue, who played Marc Antony in Julius Ceasar (a serious role indeed), for doing a marvelous job as the fool, Touchstone, in As You Like it. He was superb! Again, we were out of the theatre by around half past eleven, and abed shortly thereafter.
All that remains is the drive home on Saturday last, which was uneventful. We stopped at Orinda for supper with my folks and my brother's daughter Danielle, who was up visiting. Sally did really well on the drives in both directions, which heartens us for the much longer trip we're about to undertake with her: Across the country in five days. But that's a story for next week.
Now I'd best get organized to continue with the packing. I've got the balance of Marcia's office to dismantle today, some yard and trash work to do before pickup tomorrow morning, and a few more phone calls to make. Hope your day is smooth. See you soon!
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July 24, 2002 - Updates at 0830
Howdy. I promise, short post and no pictures today. So, what's new and fun with Linux for me, today? I've got OpenOffice installed on my system again, finally. You might not think that was a very big deal, but I'm running a testing version of the Gentoo Linux distribution. It uses GCC3.1 as the C and C++ compiler, and not much pre-compiled software works on this box. That's generally OK, because I'm used to building my own anyway. But by itself, OpenOffice is a tricky build. But finally, sometime in June, the Gentoo folks put together an OpenOffice source build file that worked with GCC3.1. Man, this is fast, hand built and running on quick processors. Yes, yes, so is Word itself. But if both OpenOffice and Word can do the job, and I don't have to give Microsoft any money for one of my options, well then... you tell me!
So what else is new? A bunch of solar coronal ejecta headed our way following an "explosion" near a sunspot. (Thanks, Doc!). This may push the aurora much further south than usual, as well as causing radio problems. Culled from Slashdot, it appears that Bruce Perens plans on actively protesting the DMCA this year at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention by demonstrating a region-hacked DVD player. Last year he showed Dmitry Sklyarov's slides. You go, Bruce!
I might not have mentioned this previously. On our house-hunting trip to Maryland at the beginning of this month, my first airplane book was Doug Adams' The Salmon of Doubt. This book is a collection of articles, short stories, some chapters in progress from what might have been his next book, and other triviata scraped out of Doug's Mac hard drive after his death. It's a good read.
This morning I ache from the work in the yard yesterday. Basically everything out there is done now. We're only taking a few plants with us, the balance either go with the trash today, or over to Angela next door! The patio drip watering system is dismantled, and what remains there is boxing the plants, taking apart and packaging the table, and pulling in the last of the garden watering system, just before we move. Today's tasks include a little bit of collection from the front yard, taking apart Marcia's office desk, and packing pictures. We're coming down to the wire.
Oh. Don't forget to keep good thoughts going for John Dominik. His employer is now soon to be his ex-employer, and that's no fun at all, especially right after they bought a house.
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July 25, 2002 - Updates at 0745
Good morning. I had another productive, tiring day yesterday. Marcia's office is now down to bare minimums. Her computer, like mine, is setup on wooden folding TV tables. Also I setup all the service/utility terminations for this place, as of next Thursday. I didn't want to do terminations too far in advance, because the likelyhood of a screwup would make life uncomfortable for too long. Now, if they cut off the phones too early, for instance, we only have to live without connectivity for less than a week. I don't imagine that things will go too badly, though.
Finally, by about 7 last night I gave up on the day, sat and cooled down for a while, then took a shower. After that, I relaxed for a bit with a large pizza for supper - Marcia was out for the evening, her last hair and nails appointment with her friends here. I followed a link from Slashdot to some material by and about Charles Stross. He's got a story (or a very long excerpt?) called Lobsters up on the Asimov's website. The story is a fun read - I'd place it in the advanced cyberpunk category. Mr. Stross is also interviewed at InfinityPlus - here's a choice quote:
'I wrote "Lobsters" and showed it to a friend. He said "that's really cool, but you'll never sell it--the audience would have to overdose on Slashdot for six months before they got it." He was completely right--he just underestimated the number of people out there who overdose on Slashdot!'
Today I've got more packing to do, what a surprise! But it's really coming down to just a couple of rooms: Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. We'll be doing those on the weekend, together. So today I'll also do wall tune-ups (patching the picture hanger holes, etc), packing random stuff from the yard, figuring out how to box a few plants, running a couple of errands, who knows what else. But everything I do today is something I won't have to do at the last minute next week, so that's a good thing.
The scary part of this whole process is that I'm looking forward to the five day cross-country drive as a way to wind down and relax after packing the house, then the truck. Pretty silly, I know. Well, I'd best get to it. See you later!
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July 26, 2002 - Updates at 0640
Good morning! Tee minus five days and counting to move day. While it seems from some perspectives that I've gotten much of the work done, I'm still worried about being blindsided by an unexpectedly large amount of work to do...
Subject: Re: Patching Holes
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2000
From: "Rick Hellewell"Noticed that you are at the point of patching holes in the walls. I recall doing the same thing (I may have told you this) in an earlier life as a renter: a quick hole-patcher is white toothpaste. Easily matches the generic white paint color of most apartments, and (as a bonus) makes the rooms smell 'minty-fresh'!
Heh. Yeah, I think you mentioned that when we moved from the apartment last year. Nah. I do the real deal: patch and paint. I feel better about it, that way.
And indeed, that's what I spent much of yesterday on. I took down the last things, curtains, hangings and a few small works of art, from the walls. Then I wandered the house with knife and spackle, patching holes. After lunch, a light sanding and refill for those larger gaps that dried back. Today I'll move all the remaining furniture to room centers. Then I'll sand and apply touchup paint to those areas.
Also today I'll pack up most of the balance of my office, reducing myself to just one computer: Gryphon the Acer Travelmate. Man, won't that be weird. I also have to pull the mattress and box spring, in order to dismantle the bed. What I'm trying to do is stay busy packing stuff, without putting away something we'll need in the next 5 days. That part gets easier as the time gets shorter.
Along with packing the bathroom and kitchen this weekend, we're going to be doing our final social rounds. We have some wonderful friends in this area, and I'm going to miss them. Admittedly Marcia and I are not what you might call "social butterflies"; we're really homebodies. However we do get out now and then. We'll have to build some new networks and relationships on that other coast, once we get settled.
I suppose I'd best have some breakfast and get to work. Sally's out from under foot, as she's gone to work with Marcia, to say goodbye to everyone there. Heh. See you later!
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July 27, 2002 - Updates at 0930
Short update time. Good morning. We had a lovely evening out at Jack and and Trudy's last night, Sally too! Speaking of which, I slept in a bit this morning (can you tell?), and Marcia woke me up at some point to tell me that Sasha, Jerry's husky, went to Valhalla yesterday. Our hearts go out to the Pournelles.
Bathroom and kitchen packing today and tomorrow, more socializing tonight. All day today, we're going to have airplanes zooming around our heads from the Moffett airshow, right down the road. That means all through the packing, I'll be running outside to see which cool airplane is zipping overhead. I'm still tired. Sigh. As Jerry says, it's a great life as long as you don't weaken. See you around!
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July 28, 2002 - Updates at 0925
Good morning. Starting sometime in the wee hours of this morning, Marcia started not feeling well. While she's apparently better now (and sound asleep), we didn't sleep too well overnight. That's too bad. After all, we have only three packing and cleaning days left until Truck Day. Then we're outta here. Low sleep isn't a good thing right now. Oh, well.
Yesterday evening, we had supper over at Myrna and Roger's place. Pat and Nathan also were over there, and we brought Sally with us to keep Laddie company. I made some salsa fresh from our garden's tomatoes and peppers (as well as a few store bought ingredients, onion, cilantro and garlic), Myrna had made a few salads, Roger had 8 pork rib racks on the barbeque, and Pat brought a chocolate chocolate chocolate cake. We ate like kings! It was wonderful spending just a little more time with our friends, we'll be missing them.
I also spent a few minutes working with Roger on his laptop. We installed Red Hat 7.3 on a secondary hard drive a while back, so that Roger can start learning how to do development work with Apache, MySQL and PHP. Yesterday I setup the OpenSSH daemon, and showed him how to open a port-forward in his Linksys gateway/router. That way, when he calls upon me for assistance from this coast, after I've moved to the other, I can get in remotely to help out.
Then he was asking about setting up an FTP server on his laptop. Instead I installed the Secure SSH Client from ssh.com on his local Windows box. It has both an SFTP terminal client and an SFTP client (which works pretty much like CuteFTP does, enough to make it easy to use). He's using this non-commercial free-to-use client for learning, not work, so it's legit, and a very handy tool. And the price isn't all that high if you need it for business purposes, IIRC. Let's see... it's about 100 bucks. Compared to sending your password in the clear over the internet everytime you might use telnet or FTP, this is a steal (if you have to have an easy to use GUI client - there *are* other solutions, of course, many of them on Linux).
And now, counterpoint from Clark Myers...
Subject: Don't use tooth paste
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2002 13:01:34 -0700
From: "clarkemyers"Don't use tooth paste - the minty fresh Peppermint Oil soaks the wall and keeps the eventual repaint from sticking - surprising how few really good shortcuts there are in life.
Clark
Indeed. And on that note, I had better start a pot of coffee to brewing, clean the few dishes in the sink, and start packing the kitchen. See y'all around here later or tomorrow!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2002 Brian P. Bilbrey.
